The Fort Mudge Memorial Dump

It is really absurdly windy out. Or maybe it's just loud because I opened some storm windows to let some of the semi-springlike air in when we had some, and didn't shut them again. All the windows need washing, but I don't think we have enough ladder to do them from outdoors and I'm not going to start with gymnastics from indoors.

I hope Lily's renewed interest in food persists when the pain shot wears off this afternoon. Yesterday she got interested in Quirk's crunchies at breakfast (so she got some of her own and ate half of them over the course of the day) and raced me down the hall to be waiting on the cat tree for dinner. I forget when she stopped doing that, but it was nice to see her do it again. She does like the Royal Canin food, though.

There is precisely one person who's allowed to make me cross things off their task list for them, and it is not the person who tried to make me do it just now. And the person who's allowed to do it has been doing it a lot lately and I wish she wouldn't. Just as well I'm taking Thursday, Friday, and Monday off.

Speaking of time off, I'm sorely tempted to take tomorrow afternoon off too, since my vaccine appointment is at 2:20 and I have to get to Cambridge and back by bus. And I want to stick my head in the Coop and the Harvard Bookstore and see if I can find the sequel to Foundryside, which I read yesterday and enjoyed. I think Robert Bennett has read Patrick Rothfuss, because the way magic works is pretty derivative, but Bennett put it in a bag with "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" and medieval Venice, and shook it up vigorously.

Yesterday was Quirk's third birthday. I hope it was better than the previous two. At least she got a little bit of celebratory sour cream (her favorite human food so far).

I did not take any personal time yesterday, unless you count the 15 minutes or so I spent providing Lily with lap space. I still need a vacation, but I seem to have found enough coping skills somewhere to get through yesterday and today. The next week I could take as vacation without probably getting work-related phone calls is the week of April 12. That's a long way away.

The vet suggested I take about a pound off Quirk and put about a pound on Lily. So far it seems to be working; Quirk looks a bit less like she swallowed a rugby ball, and Lily's spine has padding over it, and when she perched on top of me in bed this morning my first half-awake thought was "Oof, HEAVY!" I think she's got a little more energy lately too. Amazing what eating enough will do, I guess.

Quirk, meanwhile, has come out of whatever shell she had left, and I've figured out some of her various vocalizations. She doesn't squeak these days; she trills, which when she's walking around means "Here's me, where's you?", and she hollers, which means "It was mealtime AGES ago and I'm STARVING!" I haven't figured out why she'll sit there and meow at me when she doesn't seem to want anything.

Yesterday it was almost warm enough for open windows, so I opened the kitchen window farthest from the thermostat. Quirk enjoyed that, and didn't try to fling herself through the screen to get at the bird feeder. I enjoyed the fresh air. It's supposed to be actual open window weather tomorrow.

I still need to go get a dead keyboard for Lily to sit on. Maybe I'll sneak out tomorrow in the open window weather. If I'm really being nice about it, I'd get a beanbag compress to put under the dead keyboard, so she'd have her own warm keyboard to sit on.

The clocks change again on Sunday. It will be light enough for a whole grocery shopping trip after 5:00. If I did that, I might not have to stand in lines outside grocery stores for so long on weekends. I would love for the vaccination rate to catch up with the mask wearing and make "social distancing" completely irrelevant.

My cats are spoiled. Not excessively, because I only buy one rotisserie chicken per month and they only get scraps of it, and I stretch out the scraps over a week. But I went out in the snow after work to buy a can of tuna to hide gabapentin in tomorrow. And Whole Foods is closer to home than the pet store is, so they get human tuna, not cat-food tuna. From Whole Foods. Spoiled, I say.

To be fair, it would have been cat-food tuna, but I didn't know I was going to need to drug them up to the eyebrows tomorrow until lunchtime today. I'm being a bit of a paranoid pet parent, because Lily's eye is getting better and she's not ready to die on me yet. But she should weigh more than she does, given how much she eats, and Dr. P agreed to move the appointment from March to tomorrow for that and the eye. I almost hope the weight problem is recurring hyperthyroid, even though that's not supposed to happen after the Radioactive Cat Saga. But at least I know how to treat that. Sticking her with an insulin needle every day if it's diabetes isn't my favorite idea. I'll do it if I have to, of course.

I'm back to wondering every morning, if I wake up before Lily comes to inquire about breakfast, whether I'm waking up to a dead cat (even though at least half of my brain knows she's not ready yet). I would dearly love to stop that. I used to wonder if I would be coming home to a dead cat, before the Radioactive Cat Saga. Then she got better and I stopped thinking that way, and it was lovely. But now she's skinny again. Not quite as skinny as before the Radioactive Cat Saga, at least. She doesn't have hipbones sticking out this time.

Quirk gets doped up to the eyebrows because she needs a rabies shot and I don't know yet how she acts with vets in her living space. Her previous vet records didn't say anything about how she acted in their various offices. Better safe than sorry. And she needs a manicure anyway, which I can do while she's loopy on happy pill and rabies shot. Why did I want cats, again? (Because, among other reasons, I would be in an absolutely awful mental state after almost a year of living completely alone in a pandemic if I didn't have them.)

I need a new team name. Lily and Snip were the Hairy Beasts, but it doesn't quite fit Lily and Quirk.

Well, at least it held off snowing a foot until February. Even if it's just barely February. And it may not even be a foot of snow, because the forecasts are between six and 14 inches.

I did at least get all the appropriate grocery shopping done over the weekend; cleaning supplies, cat crunchies, and half of the groceries on Saturday and the other half of the groceries yesterday. It can snow if it really has to. And I am finally out of mandarin oranges. I definitely don't want any more, partly because the craving has been taken care of and partly because half of them were hard to peel.

I think I more or less walked a wart off my toe. Which is what happens when you get a blister under a callus and it turns out when the callus sloughs off that there's a little black dot under it, which means the rough part of the callus was probably a wart. I excised the black dot and we'll see how it goes when there's new skin over the whole thing.

On Saturday night the whole household ended up hanging around on the living room rug together for an hour or so, and Lily and Quirk actually snoozed at each other. That was nice. It didn't happen again last night, but at least now it's happened once. Lily still doesn't want Quirk in her personal space unless I'm also in her personal space.

One disaster at a time, please? I don't particularly like running faculty searches, but I keep having to (and I'm running one now), and as of this morning I'm supposed to figure out how to run a half-day virtual CE course sometime in the spring. I like that even less, although at least I've given my boss an idea that does not involve me giving a presentation. I know considerably less about clinical case completion and virtual OSCE as global assessments than some other people do.

I had been debating whether Quirk was merely young (she'll be 3 at the end of March) and enthusiastic, or not all that bright, but I've come down on the side of young and enthusiastic. I figured out this morning that she's been training me to come retrieve cat toys when she gets them stuck. She lets out a pathetic little meow and if I'm quick enough, she'll hang around where she thinks the toy went so I don't have to hunt all over the room (usually the kitchen, and the toy is usually under the cookbook shelf/birdbath viewing platform, or down the side of the washing machine). But now that I've figured out the game, it doesn't always work. And training goes both ways; I can call her by jingling the ball with the bell in it.

Quirk is mostly delightful, but every so often I still miss Snip fiercely.

I ordered an out-of-print book on December 23. It shipped from California on December 30, with an estimated delivery date of between January 15 and February 2 and no tracking available. I'm amusing myself imagining a tortoise with the book tied to it, crossing the Rockies and making its way through Kansas and so forth, because that's about the only thing slower than book rate mail.

I ordered new saucepans even though I need new underwear somewhat more, on the theory that lack of new underwear isn't going to poison me. Old flaking nonstick saucepans might eventually. No idea when they might arrive, of course, but at least I ordered them. (Farberware stainless steel with glass lids. I cook by sight a fair bit and overcooked vegetables aren't my best favorite thing.)

Quirk has discovered the kitchen, and spent most of Saturday standing on her hind legs watching food TV out the kitchen window. Yesterday she spent most of the day in one of the kitchen chairs (probably having tired her legs out), and I moved her litterbox from the office into the pantry because she already knew Lily's was there and they've been using each other's anyway. And I really wanted to vacuum the office rug, because she wants to dig through the litterbox down to the earth's core, and sweeping the rug wasn't adequate. But I couldn't vacuum with Quirk in the room. I also moved her crunchies dish into the kitchen. She seems to be willing to eat pretty much anything, fish or poultry or the crunchies she came with (Hill's, which I'm weaning her off of because they're too expensive to be corn-based) or Lily's crunchies, and seems to be taking it all in stride digestion-wise. Thank goodness.

Yesterday was also Annual Shredding Day, since Quirk wasn't in the office. I shredded the 2019 utility bills (I keep them for a year, ever since the one time Eversource undercharged me for four months and then sent a massive bill, and I couldn't do anything about it because I'd thrown away the bills after I paid them) and Snip's insurance and vaccination records. I shredded a very old rabies tag by accident because it was taped to a piece of folded-over paper, but the shredder dealt with it quite well. I suppose since it will shred credit cards, I shouldn't have been surprised; rabies tags are thinner even though they're aluminum. But I should have been paying more attention to what I was shredding in the first place.

Lily and Quirk met on purpose this morning. Lily's been going crazy wanting to climb over the gate in the office door since Tuesday (she can't, she's not tall enough), and Quirk wanted out this morning, so I took down the gate (partly because I'm almost not tall enough to climb over it either, and I'm tired of trying to do it with coffee in hand) and let them get together. There was some hissing and some meowing and eventually Lily went out again. An hour or so later Quirk went out, and Lily chased her (silently) back in here and she went into the back of the closet again. Lily kept going into the closet and meowing and hissing at her some more in between periods of hanging around on my desk and getting in my way. Quirk came out from the back of the closet eventually, and Lily went off for her afternoon nap.

I assume all the hissing and whatnot is because we need to know precisely who's in charge here. Surprise, it's me; I can call Lily off. But I don't unless there are signs of actual violence or unless Quirk can't get away, because they've got to figure it out themselves to a certain extent. Some of me wishes I could have taken the gate down and gone somewhere else for the next eight or so hours and let them sort it all out now that they're inclined to sort things out. But (a) pandemic, (b) great big snowstorm, and (c) Thursday.

Speaking of Thursday, it really should have been Friday yesterday. The student who can't write is now at the point of submitting the article for publication, and yesterday I sent her off to read the submission instructions for the European Journal of Dental Education, and she wrote me back and said she doesn't understand them and can I walk her through them, and walk her through reformatting the references, on Zoom? ARGH. No, I couldn't do it yesterday, because I was trying to proofread two sets of surveys and come up with ten years of admissions data and exam grades before tomorrow. And I don't want to do it today, because today I had to submit an article to the JDE (upon which email from my boss saying oh, by the way, I wanted these six people suggested as reviewers, and here are their names with no email addresses. But I can't suggest reviewers without withdrawing and resubmitting the whole article, and I can't even do that right now because it hasn't been seen by an actual human yet), and fill out and submit the six CODA site visitor annual forms (that were due in October sometime, of course, but my boss never did them, so she sent them to me to do ASAP please), and and and...suffice it to say I have no patience for any handholding, but if I don't do it today or tomorrow it's not going to go away, and will be hanging over me when we get back on January 4. I already have at least two recommendation letters for a student who's applying to MBA programs hanging over me and due January 5, which means I have to write them tomorrow. SNARL.

I have nothing against the MBA applicant. He's very nice. But I am completely sick of doing things other people should be doing, particularly at the last minute. And some of the data I needed yesterday had to come from the Drama Llama, and ye gods, the WHINING. I know that a lot of the problem with all of these things right now is me, in the "meet assholes all day and you're the asshole" vein. But I hate every single one of these tasks and pretty much every single one of the people who palmed them off on me. So there.

I didn't jinx it; the Quirk has landed and the cat quest is over. Quirk is currently in the very back of the spelunking closet, which doesn't surprise me at all. Lily didn't understand why she couldn't come visit me in the office the way she usually does in the afternoon, so I took the computer into the living room just in case I have to do any actual work in the next couple of hours. And it's Friday anyway, so I don't have to be glued to the computer tomorrow. I can't be anyway, because I've got errands to do.

Pending receipt of actual vet records, the story I got was Quirk was more or less living under a car in Queens and got her tail run over. A vet in NY amputated the tail and spayed her, and sent her up here, at which point she developed a hernia from the spay and had to have that surgically corrected too. No wonder she doesn't like people very much; I wouldn't either if they kept knocking me out and I kept waking up with more stitches. But everything physical is healed now, at least, and hopefully when she realizes she only has to deal with one cat and one human, she'll relax.

I almost started crying again when I realized that all of Snip's adoption and vaccination records can go in the shred pile this winter. Guess I had better start a Quirk file, though.